As the number of channels available to television viewers has increased, along with the diversity of the programming content available on such channels, it has become increasingly challenging for television viewers to identify television programs of interest. Electronic program guides (EPGs) identify available television programs, for example, by title, time, date and channel, and facilitate the identification of programs of interest by permitting the available television programs to be searched or sorted in accordance with personalized preferences.
A number of recommendation tools have been proposed or suggested for recommending television programming and other items of interest. Television program recommendation tools, for example, apply viewer preferences to an EPG to obtain a set of recommended programs that may be of interest to a particular viewer. Generally, television program recommendation tools obtain the viewer preferences using implicit or explicit techniques, or using some combination of the foregoing. Implicit television program recommendation tools generate television program recommendations based on information derived from the viewing history of the viewer, in a non-obtrusive manner. Explicit television program recommendation tools, on the other hand, explicitly question viewers about their preferences for program attributes, such as title, genre, actors, channel and date/time, to derive viewer profiles and generate recommendations.
While currently available recommendation tools assist users in identifying items of interest, they suffer from a number of limitations, which, if overcome, could greatly improve the convenience and performance of such recommendation tools. For example, to be comprehensive, explicit recommendation tools are very tedious to initialize, requiring each new user to respond to a very detailed survey specifying their preferences at a coarse level of granularity. While implicit television program recommendation tools derive a profile unobtrusively by observing viewing behaviors, they require a long time to become accurate. In addition, such implicit television program recommendation tools require at least a minimal amount of viewing history to begin making any recommendations. Thus, such implicit television program recommendation tools are unable to make any recommendations when the recommendation tool is first obtained.
A need therefore exists for a method and apparatus that can recommend items, such as television programs, unobtrusively before a sufficient personalized viewing history is available. In addition, a need exists for a method and apparatus for generating program recommendations for a given user based on the viewing habits of third parties.